


the sound of wedding bells

by lizbobjones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Season/Series 12 Spoilers, but set way past current canon in a nice safe everyone's happy again place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 18:08:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8456572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: this is literally just gross Destiel wedding-related fluff





	

_In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until…_

Dean catches himself at it again, and his elbow slips off the edge of the table and he startles himself back to being fully awake. He flushes red, feels his ears pounding with embarrassment. But when Sam barely even glances up at him, raising his eyebrows more to himself than working up the energy for a full eye-roll in Dean’s direction, he realises he got away with it. After all, he can’t read thoughts – he could have just thought Dean was spacing out on reading the huge book in front of him, he wouldn’t know what thoughts had been plaguing Dean all week.

It’s ridiculous, really. It’s like having a song caught in his head. He hasn’t even been to a proper wedding, ever. He has to have picked all the words up from TV. It’s not even like he’s thinking anything more – no fantasies or elaborate scenarios to walk himself up the aisle… (wait, the bride does that part, right? See, he doesn’t even know!) Just random snippets of the vows drifting in and out of his thoughts when his brain idles.

He slams the book shut and makes a show of yawning and stretching and groaning. “I’m beat, I can’t read another line tonight. See ya in the morning.”

He flees from the library like he can leave the stupid thoughts behind.

*

It happens again the next day. They meet Mary on the road to the hunt she picked out for them; she parks her motorbike next to the Impala and Dean tries not to act too jealous, and then a minute later she and Sam are off buying snacks and he’s somehow left watching the car fill up and his brain is sending back white noise that sounds suspiciously like _to have and to hold_ except it – okay, it totally was another snippet of those ridiculous vows, but he catches himself and looks around the otherwise deserted gas station and no one saw him staring into the middle distance with a happy glazed look on his face.

He pretends to himself like this has absolutely nothing to do with how three minutes ago Mary cheerfully asked if Cas would be joining them, in a totally normal way. No interrogation or sneaky angling to know anything about him or how Dean felt, so why had he got all defensive at the time… And why was he now trying to shake the words out of his brain.

 _Forever hold your peace_.

He rolls his eyes at himself, and thankfully the car is full and there’s stuff to do with his hands and that means something to point his brain at which is not the distant sound of organ music.

*

Mary has the same terrible taste in soap operas as Dean, which probably shouldn’t surprise him because he feels like now he’s been prompted by current events, he half-remembers her watching them when he was a kid, but unfortunately there’s some sort of dramatic wedding episode happening when she finds the channel on the TV in her room (she’s really excited about all the channels – he’s caught her watching the shopping channels before and also had to stop her buying stuff from them). He doesn’t have the energy to pretend that he doesn’t know vaguely what’s going on or at least who some of the characters are.

Still, when he actually hears the wedding music by the time the characters have got past most of their hysterics and are ready for the main event, it’s somehow too much to bear. He makes an excuse and goes back to his and Sam’s room, lays on his bed and stares at the ceiling. They got adjoining rooms, and he can hear Sam asking too many questions about the plot to try and keep up (he would be interested now Mary was watching it – not like he had spent years making fun of Dean every time he stumbled on Dean sneakily catching up on the show)

Dean pulls a pillow over his head and tries to block it out – he’s so so tired of wedding stuff and he has no idea why. Trying to shut it all out just makes the refrain of _Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today_ wander through his brain on a loop.

He gives up and grabs his jacket, and drops by the next room.

“I’m going to the bar.”

Mary has Sam’s laptop out on her knees and Sam has the look of someone trying not to murder his own recently returned mother while she tries to figure out how to use Youtube – the TV is muted and Dean guesses the plot summary has got out of control, and is going to take a while.

Sam definitely gives him a “save yourself” look instead of the weary look Dean had expected.

He wisely leaves before anyone makes him mediate between one who has no idea what the other is looking for but would know how to find it if they did, and one who knows exactly what they’re looking for and no idea how to get there.

(Mostly because he does not want to admit he could probably give them season and episode numbers to search if he was asked.)

*

Walking down the street to the bar he saw on the corner on the way into town is a nightmare. It leaves his brain free in a way he doesn’t get with driving, and the white noise returns. His feet tap on the pavement in a relentless tune of _will you take this man to be your husband, will you take this man to be your husband, will you take –_

Dean’s phone rings before he’s halfway down the block. He checks and nearly drops it when he sees “Castiel” on the screen; his thumb catches the answer button as he fumbles phone, and before he can calm down he realises he’s on the line to Cas, and reluctantly puts the phone to his ear.

“I do.” Wait. _Fuck_ –

“Dean, are you okay?”

“Yeah! Peachy! What?” he is aware his voice is cracking and he’s talking way too loudly.

“I mean,” and Cas’s voice is definitely accompanied with narrow eyes wherever he’s scowling and phoning Dean from, “I phoned to ask if you were okay. I’ve been feeling you praying to me all week, and it’s…”

“No I haven’t!” Dean squawks before he can stop himself. “I didn’t mean to!”

“I _know_ ,” Cas says, and yeah, Dean’s screwed. He knows what this is already. “You think too loudly in my direction sometimes. I get impressions – feelings…”

Dean looks around to see if there’s some hole he can jump into to save him the trouble of digging one.

“I, um.”

Cas doesn’t seem to have a good answer either, because there’s just silence on his end, and the angel doesn’t even have the decency to breathe loudly into the phone. He gives Dean a painfully long moment to answer, until it’s clear there really isn’t one forthcoming and Dean is going to continue making confused noises on his end of the line.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry, I –”

Dean knows he’s about to get hung up on, and that’s his fault if he lets it happen.

“Wait, Cas. Um.”

What.

Is he just going to ask Cas to marry him out of the blue because he misses him? It’s not like Mary leaving earlier in the year – that had been sharp and unexpected and hurt like a bitch at the time, but she came back, and they worked things out and sure she doesn’t live with them but she’s around and they’re learning to be a team now and it’s all weirdly alright and they’ve got a new sort of normal… And in that time Cas has drifted in and out of their lives half a dozen times like he always does and it’s no different than any of the other hundred times. It hurts, Cas is gone, Cas is back, Dean is happy and hopes he stays… Cas is gone again.

This probably all began, though, the wedding thing, when he found out that when Cas left the same time as Mary, that he’d gone to work with Crowley to find Lucifer and Crowley, for some incomprehensible reason, had told Dean - and Dean had just thought this was Crowley being Crowley – that he “should have put a ring on it”.

No, he has no idea what that was about, but it must have dug right down deep in his brain, because months later when he thinks of Cas, all he hears is wedding bells.

“Dean?”

“We should get married.”

Dean is treated to the sound of a phone bouncing onto a hard floor and the call cuts out. He holds his phone away from his ear and winces. A wave of panic at what he said hits him with physical dizziness, and he hits redial at once to try and laugh it off as a joke, but it seems he actually made Cas break his phone in shock, because it goes straight to a message that the call can’t connect.

He goes to the bar.

*

Dean is two drinks in and almost stopped shaking when his phone finally rings with an unknown number.

“I had to find a payphone,” Cas announces by way of hello. He sounds fairly normal despite that, which is good because Dean feels inches from laughing hysterically, and he already had to fight off the terrified impulse to try and pick up one of the girls at the bar to try and put a nice big wall between “This” and “Ever Happening”. Except he chickened out of chickening out, so now he’s just wallowing in a corner and has been spinning ice in the bottom of his glass waiting for it to melt and listening to his brain trying to make _til death do us part_ fit into the tune of every song that’s played since he got here.

“Sorry about that,” Dean says, like it’s totally normal to off-handedly propose over the phone from a standing start when you haven’t done more than text each other stupid puns Dean thought of in line waiting for coffee or pictures of weird clouds Cas saw that day for over a week.

(The pretty sunset pictures he sends are the worst. Dean’s started looking at any sunset he’s outdoors for and thinking of Cas. It’s the most annoying thing Cas has ever done to him.)

“Actually,” Dean says, as these thoughts occur to him. “Not sorry.”

“Good. I would like to marry you.”

“Good. Okay then.”

“I’m glad we agree.”

There’s a long silence. Dean picks up his empty glass and swirls the last shards of ice around in the water that’s accumulated at the bottom. He can hear cars on the road Cas is by. It’s somewhere between the most awkward silence of his life and the most peaceful.

“We’re working a case with Mom right now – it might be a week or so before we get back. Can you make it back by then?”

“Of course.”

“Right. Good. I’ll, um, pick you up a ring in town or something. See you there.”

“I’ll be home waiting for you.”

Cas hangs up on him.

Dean goes to get another drink while he works out how to answer to any questions over the next week about why he’s floating around smiling to himself with something better than “I’m engaged to Cas because he wanted me to stop praying wedding music at him.”


End file.
